Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010)
The tumultuous yet magnificent year of 2024 for cryptocurrency is coming to an end, and 2025 is already waving at us. Many crypto institutions, including Coinbase, a16z, VanEck, and Messari, are betting that AI will become one of the 'main themes' for next year.
Apart from the AI Agent and AI Meme coins leading market trends in the second half of this year, a series of high-quality projects in the AI track are gradually attracting significant market attention. Among them, Sahara AI, which previously raised a total of $43 million and has recently launched the first phase of the testnet, has become a market focus. According to the latest official news, the 2024-2025 roadmap was released today, with the mainnet scheduled to go live in Q3 2025.
Odaily Planet Daily will provide a systematic introduction to this project in this article, helping readers understand this star project positioned as a 'decentralized AI blockchain platform' dedicated to building AI Chain.
Sahara Project Overview: Raised $43 million, star team + well-known capital.
According to previous introductions, Sahara AI is a decentralized artificial intelligence network that allows everyone to leverage their knowledge capital to discover monetization and automation opportunities through artificial intelligence. The initially launched basic products include Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data.
In August of this year, Sahara AI announced the completion of a new round of financing, led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Thailand's Kasikorn Bank, DAO 5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures, etc. The new funds will be used to further expand the global team, enhance the performance of its AI blockchain, and accelerate the development of its developer ecosystem. This round is Sahara AI's Series A financing, with a total financing amount of approximately $43 million. At that time, due to the project's early stage, we also briefly introduced its potential interaction methods in the article (A hands-on guide to interacting with the five major projects invested by Binance Labs in August).
The team behind Sahara: Top talent from the crypto and AI circles.
According to information on the official website, the team behind Sahara AI includes Sean Ren (@xiangrenNLP), an AI professor at the University of Southern California and chairman of the Viterbi Center, who previously worked at Ai 2, Snapchat, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Tyler Zhou (@tz_sahara), former investment director at Binance Labs; and several key members with prestigious backgrounds responsible for product, operations, ecosystem building, and community work.
Sahara AI Team List
After the completion of the financing in August, Binance co-founder He Yi directly expressed her expectations and optimism for Sahara's subsequent development, stating, 'I look forward to Sahara AI as a pioneer in building a decentralized AI blockchain platform to reshape the future of AI, making it more transparent, secure, and accessible to everyone.'
It is worth mentioning that Sahara AI held an AMA with the technical staff of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, on the 20th of this month, discussing some topics related to the outlook for AI development in 2025. The content leaned towards technical discussions and industry research, with relatively lighter emphasis on Crypto, highlighting a marketing approach that is somewhat different from other DeAI projects, giving a sense that 'we are seriously pursuing AI + Blockchain, not just telling stories.' Previously, the project also officially announced that it had achieved SOC 2 compliance certification (SOC 2 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 2), emphasizing the importance of enhancing the security, availability, and confidentiality of AI development.
Recent AMA of Sahara AI
Entering Sahara AI: Building a Human-AI Collaborative Network
Based on the information from the Sahara AI official website white paper and official documents, the project focuses on the following aspects—
Self-positioning: A decentralized blockchain platform for an open, fair, and collaborative AI economy.
Core Concept: 'Artificial Intelligence Assets,' referring to ownership and management agreements for private AI resources (such as personal data and proprietary models).
Target Audience: AI developers, data providers, and other stakeholders, including C-end users and B-end users, as well as AI asset traders.
Service Content: Ranging from data collection and annotation to model training and services, AI agent creation and deployment, multi-agent communication, AI asset trading, and AI resource crowdsourcing.
User Life Journey on the Sahara Chain
At this stage, the main focus of Sahara AI is on 'data,' one of the 'three elements of AI (computing power, algorithms, data),' which involves collecting, refining, and annotating datasets to enhance AI model performance. Subsequently, through the continuous refinement and development of developer tools and data service platforms, Sahara AI will launch AI assets and AI markets to facilitate the formation of an 'AI economic closed loop' for developers, users, and enterprises.
Project Progress: The first phase of the testnet has been launched, and the mainnet will go live in Q3 2025.
On December 19, Sahara AI officially announced that the first phase of the testnet was officially launched, selecting 10,000 participants from nearly 800,000 applicants. The main task involves contributing to the construction of the data service platform through actions such as check-ins and data annotation. The official explanation is that this move aims to encourage user participation in knowledge contribution and early reward acquisition.
This afternoon, Sahara AI officially announced the 2024-2025 project roadmap, which includes the following key information:
Q4 2024: Launch the first phase of the testnet through the data service platform, which is already live; the second phase will start in Q1 2025.
Q1 2025: Launch the AI market, introduce limited access to developer tools, and expand the data service platform.
Q2 2025: Launch a comprehensive tool, Sahara Studio, to simplify AI development, including model training toolkit, model deployment toolkit, and model orchestration toolkit.
Q3 2025: The mainnet of Sahara Chain will go live, providing the necessary on-chain infrastructure to support large-scale decentralized AI.
Sahara AI Latest Roadmap
The official website also provides specific planning details regarding Sahara AI's product roadmap, as shown in the image below:
Sahara Product Planning Diagram
According to its official website information, the Sahara AI ecosystem currently includes 200,000 AI trainers, over 35 enterprise clients, and over 3 million data annotations.
Existing Data on the Official Website
Latest Interactive Tutorial: Testnet Interaction + Application for Testnet Second Phase
Currently, early participants selected for the first phase of the Sahara AI testnet can interact in the following ways to earn corresponding point rewards:
Log in at http://app.saharalabs.ai to create a profile;
Log in at https://faucet.saharaa.info to receive SAH test tokens;
Complete various tasks on the data service dashboard to earn corresponding Sahara Points (SP) or experience points (EXP).
For more detailed information, you can view the task requirements here: https://docs.saharalabs.ai/data-services-page.
It is noteworthy that due to the emphasis on the quality of data annotation, if users answer randomly, leading to repeated task failures, they may face restrictions on answering questions or even lose their eligibility for the testnet, so please pay attention.
Data Service Page Display
Additionally, here is the application URL for the second phase of the testnet Waitlist: https://hi.saharalabs.ai/get-started.
Summary: Can Sahara AI build an 'AI oasis' in the Sahara Desert?
Finally, Sahara AI has repeatedly mentioned its commitment to building an AI Chain centered on the 'AI economy.' In a time when countless crypto projects view AI as a meme label, this undoubtedly reflects a considerable amount of courage and exploratory spirit. Whether it can build an 'AI oasis' for AI users and developers in what can be considered a desert-like crypto soil today remains to be seen, perhaps Sahara AI will provide its answer in the future.
Odaily Planet Daily will continue to follow more developments of Sahara AI and will introduce its ecosystem in greater depth at an opportune time, providing readers with a more comprehensive understanding of its value.